Also Here: Love, Literacy, and the Legacy of the Holocaust

Randel puts her illiterate grandmother’s recollections of surviving the Holocaust on the page in this powerful debut. Golda Indig, Randel’s maternal grandmother, was born in 1930 Czechoslovakia and grew up in Elie Weisel’s hometown of Sighet, Hungary. Her family was at first unaffected by the German invasion, but in 1944, Golda was shipped off to Auschwitz, then to Bergen-Belsen, and finally to the women’s labor camp Christianstadt. As Randel transcribes her grandmother’s memories of being packed into cold living quarters “like herring” and sharing a single bowl of food among six people, she reflects on how the experiences shaped Golda into someone who “wasted no time in giving what she could... feeding loved ones without limit.” As their conversations moved past WWII and into Golda’s adulthood, bout with cancer, and the deaths of her husband, siblings, and friends, Randel came to truly “consider her, the girl she was, the woman she became, and the hurt she carried.” The resulting narrative nimbly balances Golda’s unvarnished testimony and Randel’s self-reflection, with the harrowing realities of the Holocaust allowed to linger beside Randel’s considerations of the value and difficulties of intergenerational dialogue. By turns horrific and surprisingly sweet, this will linger in readers’ minds. (Dec.)